Review: GARGOYLE “Reborn in Blasphemy”

GARGOYLE “Reborn in Blasphemy”
Shadow Kingdom records

Releasing stuffs on tapes is popular on Metal scene since some time quite. I’ll don’t participate here in discussion why some bands decide to release their stuff just this way, is it good, makes it sense in digital era and so on. I personally just love this medium!!! This is surely connected with my age and fact of background of Poland in times of communism and early 90’s – the only what we had was vinyl records and tapes in these times.

There’re few bands with name GARGOYLE (what in my opinion is ok and I can’t see any problem in that – contrary to some guys whose dispute about it I saw once in social media). This one comes from the biggest city of Calabria. This region is situated in southern Italy. Actually it’s the last one on the continent – then there’s only Sicily which’s an island. Reggio di Calabria has roots in Magna Grecia (times when huge territory of southern Italy and the most of Sicily was colonized and ruled by Greeks) – was found in 720 before Nazarene. But in the city there’s relatively not much monuments. Reason of that are huge earthquakes which totally destroyed Reggio di Calabria (which under its history was renamed few times) several times.

Anyway, in the city lives a little more than 200.000 people, so it’s clear that there’re Metal bands, too. One of the youngest is GARGOYL, formed last year. I have no information that guys played somewhere before. But worse is that I have no idea who plays what instrument here. I mean, there’s written something on their profile on blue “f”, but it’s doing in such mysterious way that I can be sure about vocalist’s position and almost sure about bassist’s one. It also seems that tape version is richer for one song than cd’s one.

By the way, I got this second one where’re four songs. All of them are rather long ones (something like five minutes) and in slow, maybe even sometimes majestic tempo. But it just can’t be in other way if guys play Doom Metal. Guys also use word “horror” to describe their music, but I can rather feel depression than fear or at least thrill of emotion during listening to this stuff. It’s about almost whole “Reborn in Blasphemy”, but there’s some short speed-up in “Lady Dead”.

Riffs are overstuffed and repeated almost whole the time. There’re some changes of them of course, but they’re rarely. The most of stuff we have impression that we listen to the same riff repeated ad infinitum. But I think that it’s not some huge shortcoming or drawback in such music. Drumming even if also quite monotonous is little more various than guitar’s work. Drummer uses cymbals maybe not all the time, but quite often. And on the end few words about Krommak’s vocal. Well, it’s also quite monotonous, but surely creates grave atmosphere. Sometimes, for short moments it turns a little to something in vein of DSBM’s one.

To sum up, it’s as on debut not bad stuff. The fact is that it’s first of all for ears of rather inclined toward depression people who like to be sad. But even if I’m absolutely not one of them I listened to “Reborn in Blasphemy”  with some dose of pleasure, if this word can be connote with such music.